Creativity (18 page)

I
NSPIRING
E
NVIRONMENTS

I wrote the first draft of this chapter in a small stone cell, seven feet square, with two French windows looking out over the eastern branch of Lake Como, in northern Italy, near the foothills of the Alps. The cell was inhabited by hermit monks about five hundred years ago, and it is built over a chapel dedicated to Our Lady of
Monserrat. An earlier version of the chapel slid into the lake a long time ago. Now, from its windows, between the dense branches of laurel, oak, cedar, and beech trees, I can see, below the rocks on which the chapel is perched, the huge body of the lake rippling toward the south, like a fabulous dragon straining to break its chains.

The walls of the cell are covered with graffiti left by earlier occupants of this secluded haven. They too had the good fortune of having been selected by the Rockefeller Foundation to spend a month at the Villa Serbelloni, in the hope that the grand views, the panoramic paths through the forests, and the romantic ruins would inspire in them fresh bursts of scholarship. “Hundreds of trails, / Thousands of pines, / Limitless are the views” goes a haikulike verse scratched by a Harvard visitor. “Generations of guests, / Ten thousand experiences, / Attainment of resonant harmony.”“
Sun on the waters” begins an entry from UCLA, “the waves aglitter, / birds in the branches, / the trees atwitter; / bells of Bellagio—a new day’s birth. Scholars in the Chapel: Heaven on earth!” Another verse, this time from Sussex University in England, ends: “…our graffiti, / Make grateful, / if grotesque entreaty, / That in this tree-encircled chapel, / We taste the tree of learning’s apple.”

There is ample precedent for such hopes. After all, the village of Bellagio, where the Villa Serbelloni stands, has been visited through the centuries by the likes of Pliny the Younger, Leonardo da Vinci, and the poets Giuseppe Parini and Ippolito Nievo—who once wrote from Sicily that he “would gladly exchange a month in Palermo for twenty-four hours in Bellagio”—all of whom sought to refresh their creativity in its magic atmosphere. “I feel that all the various features of Nature around me…provoked an emotional reaction in the depth of my soul, which I have tried to transcribe in music”
wrote Franz Liszt during his stay here.

And from the highest points of the villa one can see at least three other similar enclaves across the lake: the Villa Monastero, formerly a convent for nuns from good families, where Italian physicists now repair to meditate and discuss quarks and neutrinos; the Villa Collina, once the private retreat of German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, now a place for German politicians to congregate; and the Villa Vigoni, built by a patriotic count of the Napoleonic era, now used for conferences that bring together Italian and German scien
tists. The air of these mountains, the smell of the azaleas, the shimmering reflection of old church spires in the fjordlike branches of the lake, are supposedly conducive to the creation of beautiful paintings, gorgeous music, and deep thoughts.

Nietzsche chose to write
Thus Spake Zarathustra
in the coolness of the nearby Engadine; Wagner loved to write his music in a villa in Ravello overlooking the hypnotic blue Tyrrhenian Sea; Petrarch was inspired to write his poetry in the Alps and in his villa near the Adriatic; the European physicists of the early part of this century seem to have had their most profound ideas while climbing mountains or looking at the stars from the peaks.

The belief that the physical environment deeply affects our thoughts and feelings is held in many cultures. The Chinese sages chose to write their poetry on dainty island pavilions or craggy gazebos. The Hindu Brahmins retreated to the forest to discover the reality hidden behind illusory appearances. Christian monks were so good at selecting the most beautiful natural spots that in many European countries it is a foregone conclusion that a hill or plain particularly worth seeing must have a convent or monastery built upon it.

A similar pattern exists in the United States. The Institute for Advanced Studies in the physical sciences at Princeton and its twin for the behavioral sciences in Palo Alto are situated in especially beautiful settings. Deer tiptoe through the immaculate grounds of the Educational Testing Services headquarters, and the research and development center of any corporation worth its salt will be situated among rolling meadows or within hearing range of thundering surf. The Aspen conferences unfold in the heady, thin air of the Rockies, and the Salk Institute sparkles over the cliffs o
f La Jolla like a Minoan temple; the idea is that such a setting will stimulate thought and refresh the mind, and thus bring forth novel and creative ideas.

Unfortunately, there is no evidence—and probably there never will be—to prove that a delightful setting induces creativity. Certainly a great number of creative works of music, art, philosophy, and science were composed in unusually beautiful sites. But wouldn’t the same works have issued forth even if their authors had been confined to a steamy urban alley or a sterile suburban spread? One cannot answer that question without a controlled experiment, and given the fact that creative works are by definition unique, it is difficult to see how a controlled experiment could ever be performed.

However, accounts by creative individuals strongly suggest that their thought processes are not indifferent to the physical environment. But the relationship is not one of simple causality. A great view does not act like a silver bullet, embedding a new idea in the mind. Rather, what seems to happen is that when persons with prepared minds find themselves in beautiful settings, they are more likely to find new connections among ideas, new perspectives on issues they are dealing with. But it is essential to have a “prepared mind.” What this means is that unless one enters the situation with s
ome deeply felt question and the symbolic skills necessary to answer it, nothing much is likely to happen.

For instance, John Reed, of Citicorp, remembers two instances in his professional life, separated in time by several years, when he had been especially creative. Both of these involved recognizing the main problem his company was facing and sketching out possible solutions. As with most creative moments, it was the formulation rather than the solution of the problem that mattered most. In both cases, Reed wrote letters to himself, more than thirty pages in length, detailing the issues his company was confronting, the dangers and the opportunities of the next years, and the steps th
at could be taken to make the most of them. The interesting thing is that both letters were written when Reed was far away from the office, ostensibly free to relax: the first on a beach in the Caribbean, the second on a park bench in Florence. He describes how the second “letter” came about:

Both “letters” were spontaneous and unpremeditated, although the issues they dealt with had been fermenting in Reed’s mind for many months. Then it took several more months, after his return to headquarters, to sort out the good ideas from the bad, partly through discussions with friends and colleagues. And then several more months had to pass before ways were found to implement them. But without the “letter from the beach” and the “letter from the bench” it is doubtful that Reed could have found such a fresh perspective on the issues confronting his company.

This example still raises the question of how much the beach and the bench actually mattered. Certainly the creative solutions to Citicorp’s problems would never have come about if anyone else had been sitting on them. The question is, would Reed have come up with the problem and the solution if he had stayed in his Manhattan office? While this question is unanswerable, the evidence does suggest that unusual and beautiful surroundings—stimulating, serene, majestic views imbued with natural and historical suggestions—may in fact help us see situations more holistically and from novel viewpoints.

How one spends time in a beautiful natural setting seems to matter as well. Just sitting and watching is fine, but taking a leisurely walk seems to be even better. The Greek philosophers had settled on the peripatetic method—they preferred to discuss ideas while walking up and down in the courtyards of the academy. Freeman Dyson’s education at Cambridge, England, owed much less to what he heard in the classroom or read in the library than to the informal and wide-ranging conversations he had with his tutor while strolling the paths around the college. And later, in Ithaca, New York, it was
through similar walks that he absorbed the revolutionary ideas of the physicist Richard Feynman: “Again, I never went to a class that Feynman taught. I never had any official connection with him at all, in fact. But we went for walks. Most of the time that I spent with him was actually walking, like the old style of philosophers who used to walk around under the cloisters.” Will the new generation of physicists, crouched in front of their computer screens, have equally interesting ideas?

When ordinary people are signaled with an electronic pager at random times of the day and asked to rate how creative they feel, they tend to report the highest levels of creativity when walking, driving, or swimming; in other words, when involved in a semiautomatic activity that takes up a certain amount of attention, while leaving some of it free to make connections among ideas below the threshold of conscious intentionality. Devoting full attention to a problem is not the best recipe for having creative thoughts.

When we think intentionally, thoughts are forced to follow a linear, logical—hence predictable—direction. But when attention is focused on the view during a walk, part of the brain is left free to pursue associations that normally are not made. This mental activity takes place backstage, so to speak; we become aware of it only occasionally. Because these thoughts are not in the center of attention, they are left to develop on their own. There is no need to direct them, to criticize them prematurely, to make them do hard work. And of course it is just this freedom and playfulness that makes it
possible for leisurely thinking to come up with original formulations and solutions. For as soon as we get a connection that feels right, it will jump into our awareness. The compelling combination may appear as we are lying in bed half asleep, or while shaving in the bathroom, or during a walk in the woods. At that moment the novel idea seems like a voice from heaven, the key to our problems. Later on, as we try to fit it into “reality,” that original thought may turn out to have been trivial and naive. Much hard work of evaluation and elaboration is necessary before brilliant flashes of
insight can be accepted and applied. But without them, creativity would not be what it is.

So the reason Martha’s Vineyard, the Grand Tetons, or the Big Sur may stimulate creativity is that they present such novel and complex sensory experiences—mainly visual ones, but also birdsong, water sounds, the taste and feel of the air—that one’s attention is jolted out of its customary grooves and seduced to follow the novel and attractive patterns. However, the sensory menu does not require a full investment of attention; enough psychic energy is left free to pursue, subconsciously, the problematic content that requires a creative formulation.

It is true that inspiration does not come only in locations sanctioned by the board of tourism. György Faludy wrote some of his
best poems while facing daily death in various concentration camps, and Eva Zeisel collected a lifetime of ideas while imprisoned in the most notorious of Stalin’s prisons, the dreaded Ljublianka. As Samuel Johnson said, nothing focuses the mind as sharply as the news that one will be executed in a few days. Life-threatening conditions, like the beauties of nature, push the mind to think about what is essential. Other things being equal, however, it would seem that a serene landscape is a preferable source of inspiration.

C
REATING
C
REATIVE
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NVIRONMENTS

While novel and beautiful surroundings might catalyze the moment of insight, the other phases of the creative process—such as preparation and evaluation—seem to benefit more from familiar, comfortable settings, even if these are often no better than garrets. Johann Sebastian Bach did not travel far from his native Thuringia, and Beethoven composed most of his pieces in rather dismal quarters. Marcel Proust wrote his masterpiece in a dark cork-lined study. Albert Einstein needed only a kitchen table in his modest lodgings in Berne to set down the theory of relativity. Of course, we do not kn
ow whether Bach, Beethoven, Proust, and Einstein may not have been inspired at some time in their lives by a sublime sight and spent the rest of their lives elaborating on the inspiration thus obtained. Occasionally a single experience of awe provides the fuel for a lifetime of creative work.

While a complex, stimulating environment is useful for providing new insights, a more humdrum setting may be indicated for pursuing the bulk of the creative endeavor—the much longer periods of preparation that must precede the flash of insight, and the equally long periods of evaluation and elaboration that follow. Do surroundings matter during these stages of the creative process?